TOULON — A Galva woman will most likely spend a year in the Stark County Jail on daily 12-hour work release for causing the death of her 7-year-old son in a drunken driving crash on a state highway in November 2012.

Hena D. Patel, 38, was sentenced Tuesday to two years, but she will serve only one if she complies with terms of probation while continuing to work at a family grocery store in Galva during that period, Judge Thomas Keith said at the end of an hourlong sentencing hearing.

Patel, whose blood alcohol content of .226 percent was nearly three times the legal limit, was also sentenced to four years’ probation with 250 hours of community service, and ordered to pay $25 a day for her incarceration and $3,168 in other costs. She has been free on bond and will start her jail term on March 31.

The sentence marks Patel’s case as quite unusual, because she pleaded guilty to aggravated DUI, a statute that makes a state prison term of at least three years mandatory unless a judge finds “extraordinary circumstances” to warrant a different outcome.

“There’s not many cases out there involving the issue of extraordinary circumstances, and the statute certainly doesn’t offer any help,” Keith observed.

After hearing family and community members as well as Patel herself plead that she not be sent to prison, Keith accepted defense attorney Anthony Vaupel’s arguments that such circumstances existed. Keith said he struggled to weigh the statute’s call for punishment of wrongdoing with evidence of Patel’s overall good character, her close relationships with two other children, and the importance of the family store in the community.

“This is truly a case that tries men’s souls,” Keith said.

State’s Attorney Jim Owens sought a four-year prison term. He argued that Patel’s family and community ties should not override the effect of drunken driving with a child who had not even been buckled into a seatbelt.

“We are here this morning because of the other extreme (of Patel’s conduct),” Owens said.

Patel’s 12-year-old son and college-age daughter asked Keith not to send their mother to prison, and her husband has expressed the same view, Vaupel said. Any further punishment of her will also punish them, and it’s time to say “enough is enough,” Vaupel argued.

“No matter what the court does to Ms. Patel,” Vaupel said, “she’s going to have to live with this for the rest of her life.”

Gary L. Smith can be reached at (800) 516-0389 or glsmith@mtco.com. Read his Northern Circuit blog at pjstar.com. Follow him on Twitter @Glsmithx.